OUR railways are in crisis, we're often told, just like our monarchy. But the last week suggested reports of the monarchy's demise were premature, and anyone from the North-East venturing south for the funeral will have noticed that the railway is not quite in meltdown.

True, the train down was late - by all of nine minutes - and overcrowded; the one home was punctual and crowded only by those irritating tickets which reserve seats for people who don't turn up.

The sandwiches were pretty appetising - lemon chicken and crayfish tails, indeed - but most impressive of all was the "quiet coach".

Our streets are - again, apparently - becoming more lawless by the day, but our rail carriages are becoming more law-abiding by the journey. There was no "ts-ts-ts" of personal stereos as passengers regulated themselves, and the one criminal outbreak - a long, loud mobile conversation - was policed by the passengers themselves. They pointed out the error of the miscreant's ways and he slunk off to the carriage-end, as anti-social as a smoker from a previous generation.

THE above, though, is a sample that is too small to be mathematically conclusive. Here's another. Tony Blair emerged from Westminster Abbey to be greeted by stony silence. Alan Milburn was similarly snubbed. Gordon Brown got a loud, enthusiastic burst of applause - from one man. But Iain Duncan Smith received a reception that verged on the rapturous on both the occasions that he was spotted by the crowd. Does this clapometer suggest how "representative" of the nation these queuers were?

THE most striking aspect of the funeral was the busby - particularly if you had queued all night for the best spot only to find yourself stuck behind one at the last moment. Big, fluffy and black, and 20 inches high, they do not make especially good windows.

It was inadvisable, though, to tap on the shoulder of the burly guardsman beneath it and ask him to budge up a bit.

Properly, these huge hats are known as bearskins. A busby is really a small 18th Century military cap once made by a firm called Busby's. Charles Dickens confused the nation in The Pickwick Papers where Sergeant Buzfuz wore a big bushy "buzz wig" which became known as a busby.

The busby/bearskin is made from the pelt of a Canadian brown bear. One bear pelt makes four bearskins at a cost of about £400.

Some of Napoleon's defeated troops at the 1815 Battle of Waterloo wore a large domed hat. The victorious British copied it and covered it in the fur of a fierce bear to show how brave they were.

PART of the British way of life is the ice cream van which plays music to entice children to run out from behind parked cars. Similarly, Taiwanese dustcarts play Beethoven's Fr Elise to persuade people to put their bins out. Their government, though, wants English to become the second language. So dustcarts are to spout conversational phrases for people to practise as they roll out the refuse. Yen Hou-long, director of education, says a typical English phrase from the dustcarts' vocabulary is: "How much does a pound of cabbage cost?"